A PLACE TO CALL HOME

I've been thinking about home lately and the cocoon it provides to my introverted inner self.

I am a homebody.  I love being surrounded by familiar sights, sounds, and smells.   I feel comfortable and safe.  I feel alive and relaxed.  I feel, well, "at home".  Even when traveling, I tend to want to return to places I've loved before, places that feel like "home" to me.  Maybe that's why Hub and I have only moved 3 times in our 41 years of marriage (and have been in this house for the past 31) and go to Kauai'i every single year and to a nearby port town for our annual December romantic getaway every holiday season.  Naturally, we've visited other places, but we tend not to adventure much -- we tend to return, again and agin, to places we know and love.

That said, every once in a while I get a hankering…and a wondering.  Am I living where I am meant to live?  Is there someplace else I would love even more?  I once met a guy who helped people find their "place".  By the way, this is what happens when an introvert wanders outside the immediate friendship fold and meets a stranger at a Kirtan retreat who is a 30-something, bearded, geographical astrologer; after two days he isn't a stranger anymore and what he says starts to make sense.   This guy, for a fee of some many dollars, offered to do a reading for me (basically a lengthy interview), and from that and the way the stars lined up at my birth or something, would discern the geographic location best suited for me -- body and soul.  It is amazing, he said, how often people's lives fall into the right rhythm when they finally find their "place".  Health improves, spirits lift, wealth flows.  Wow.

But the skeptic in me wonders if any place is forever fabulous.  That port town Hub and I love so much has been the subject of many years' pondering -- should we move there?  "It would be so awesome to live there!", we think.  But would it?  Would its relative isolation and smallish-ness come to feel claustrophobic?  Would we miss the bustle of a more urban area?  Our many good friends?  Our family  10 minutes away (instead of 2-1/2 hours)?  Is "home" just a place on a map, no matter how geographically perfect, or is it, after many, many years of putting down roots also a place of friends, family, memories, familiarity, connection, and commitment?

We could move.  We could go anywhere.  We have always had a "grass is greener" wandering eye, wondering in each place we've visited, "Would we want to live here?"  But we always came back home.  Now, though, there is no job holding us; the kids are grown; the house is too big; the maintenance expensive and wearying.   We know many folks our age who have left it all….those who have acted upon the stereotypical retirement dream of relocating to a warmer climate or a smaller town and starting over.  There is a part of me that actually feels some excitement about that -- the possibilities of a new place, a new life, a new beginning.  Yet….

There is so much holding me here.  So much I still love and want in my life that is RIGHT HERE, in my house, in my community, in my little corner of the world.  It could be I am tempted by the"idea" of a new life, but tempered by the reality that I'd just be taking this life right along with me no matter where I go.

Creating a home, I think, is an act of commitment to place and to spirit.  When those align we've found where we are meant to be.  The trick is to recognize it when it happens and to stop looking over our shoulders or scanning the horizon.  The trick, for me, is to be "home" no matter where I am -- here in my big, old, beautiful comfortable house -- and there -- on Kalapaki Beach, or the Palace Hotel, or in the back of my truck camper on a high mountain highway.  I am home.  I am home.

At least, that's the view from here….